A time for discovery

COLD|JILIN

A crystallized northern kin

Neighboring Jilin province is akin to Heilongjiang's cousin in many respects, including how its identity crystallizes around winter in more than mere imagination.

Its capital, Changchun, likewise stages an ice-and-snow fest. It also hosts the Tiandingshan Ski Resort and the Wanda Indoor Ski Resort, which opened in late December to provide year-round experiences with a constant temperature of — 6 C. And Jilin city is home to another of the continent's biggest ski resorts, Beida Lake, with 74 ski trails stretching 80 kilometers in total and augmented-reality navigation screens.

The province's most distinctive seasonal phenomenon is Jilin city's rime, which is listed among China's Four Great Natural Wonders. An unfrozen segment of the Songhua River exhales mist that clings to the willow branches that cascade toward its banks, rendering countless frosted plumes. The city even offers a real-time rime-viewing service you can check on your phone.

Further off the beaten path, visitors can experience the millennium-old tradition of winter angling, catching fish that leap from the surface of Chagan Lake before dining on them at farmhouse restaurants near the shore.

The Changbai Mountain Snow Ridge bristles with lone pines and huddled thickets of birch. The climate here forges such natural formations as "snow mushrooms" and snow caves. People ride horse-drawn sleds and snowmobiles through this incredible landscape, which is home to a wildlife park inhabited by sika and roe deer, and wild sable. It hosts yet another ice fest at its Ice and Snow Fantasy Park, where imagination takes shape in frozen water.

Visitors can sample such ethnic Korean delicacies as soybean-paste soup, glutinous rice cakes and stone-pot bibimbap year-round. They can enjoy Chinese New Year specialties like sweet-and-sour pork, snowflake red-bean paste, iron-pot stew, kimchi with pork and blood sausage and — a newer innovation that has become a recent addition to tradition — frozen-pear coffee.

Travelers who make the trip during Chinese New Year may discover that extreme cold can be a source of creation rather than limitation.